Uneducated…

I think for me this is probably the most unexpected of any post I could write on here but it’s how I’ve been feeling, that’s for certain. About a month ago now I started back at university embarking upon my second year of my literature degree which I completely adore, but it feels different to last year because this year I’ve been feeling really overwhelmed. I haven’t even needed to begin writing essays yet, deadlines are more than a month away, I’ve done nearly all my reading and yet I feel in my seminars and lectures that I’m the most uneducated one in the whole class.

I love my degree and know it was definitely the right one for me to choose, and the classes themselves I adore just as much. There exciting and interesting and so many complex ideas are presented and then elaborated on and yet for me I feel my words come out common and simple, while my peers are fluent in elegance of the educated words and rather posh. They elaborate in relation to all these literary theories which I haven’t seen nor heard of before and then once I’ve read up on one there appears to be another and I feel as if I’ve fallen behind once again. Perhaps I’m unqualified to call myself a university student of literature and perhaps I’m not.

I went to see one of my tutors today actually, I spoke about how I was feeling and I was surprised by his response. I found out that my own lecturer left the same as well at times and it wasn’t just me. The idea that my peers and teachers could potentially feel the same honestly surprised me to no end and in all honestly it made me feel a lot better overall too. Even though I felt overwhelmed it was nice to know that this anxious feeling of mine was not uncommon and that actually it was one of the most normal feelings a student can feel.